The Science of Reading Is More Than Phonics, and It Works for Multilingual Learners.

For a long time, the Science of Reading became synonymous with phonics: decoding drills, letter-sound correspondence charts on the wall. That was partly a necessary correction, given how little phonics instruction many schools were doing at the time. But it also left many educators with a too-narrow picture of what the research actually says about teaching children to read.

The Science of Reading was never limited to phonics. It’s an interdisciplinary body of evidence, built over decades, pointing to one consistent conclusion: reading comprehension depends on two coordinated skills. Students have to read the words on the page (word reading) and understand what those words mean (language comprehension). Influential frameworks like the Simple View of Reading and Scarborough’s Reading Rope have spotlighted both halves of that equation for decades, but word reading dominated the conversation in the movement’s early years.

The Science of Literacy Is for Multilingual Learners

A second myth tends to travel alongside the first: that the Science of Reading “doesn’t work” for multilingual learners (MLLs). That belief isn’t just inaccurate; it can actively steer instruction in the wrong direction.

The two myths are connected. If you believe the Science of Reading is only about phonics, it’s a short step to assuming it doesn’t serve MLLs well. The data seems, at first glance, to support that: only about 1 in 3 school-age students in the U.S. read at or above proficiency level, and among MLL students (students from homes where a language other than English is spoken and who are still developing academic English proficiency) the picture is starker still, with just 1 in 10 fourth graders and 1 in 20 eighth graders reading at or above proficiency. But if phonics was the whole story, closing that gap would mostly come down to better decoding instruction. Any teacher who has worked with MLL students knows their needs go well beyond that.

Why These Myths Persist

Part of the answer is practical: phonics is simply easier to assess. Language comprehension is a broader, harder-to-pin-down construct, and reliable assessments for it remain limited. This is especially true for MLL students, who are too often evaluated with English-only measures that ignore the linguistic knowledge they bring from another language. When assessment leans phonics-heavy, instruction tends to follow, and an imbalance develops: the students who most need language comprehension support (like MLL students and students with language-based disabilities) are the least likely to receive it, precisely because it’s the piece no one is reliably measuring.

A subtler myth sits underneath both of these, and it often shows up as unconscious bias rather than explicit belief: that a student’s reading struggles stem from their language status itself. As Dr. Jeannette Mancilla-Martinez writes in her white paper on the Science of Reading and multilingual learners,

“Speaking other languages is not a risk factor for compromised academic achievement.”

What actually predicts difficulty is the same set of factors that affects English-only students too: access to well-resourced schools, experienced teachers, and explicit language comprehension instruction, which are often compounded for MLL students by poverty and under-resourced schooling.

That’s also why English learner (EL) services alone aren’t always enough to close the gap. EL services are typically designed to build general English proficiency so students can access grade-level content, not to specifically build the language comprehension skills reading requires. A student can be well served by EL services and still need direct, explicit language comprehension instruction. Both are necessary, and neither is sufficient on their own.

Translating Research to Practice

Two research-backed moves can make a real difference in classrooms this year:

Build language comprehension directly into read-alouds. Interactive read-alouds are already common practice. Pairing one with sequence cards or a chain-of-events story map turns oral retelling into explicit work on narrative structure, which is what actually transfers to comprehension.

Teach vocabulary as connected ideas, not isolated words. Word lists in isolation don’t build much, but conceptually related word sets do. Grouping describe, detail, and explain together around informational text builds a web of meaning students can apply across their schoolwork. For Spanish-speaking MLL students, that grouping does double duty: describir, detalle, and explicar are cognates, giving students a direct bridge from what they already know in one language to what they’re learning in another.

The Science of Literacy

As Alex Luciano, a bilingual second-grade teacher, put it in his own reflection on teaching multilingual learners:

“This is not a rejection of the Science of Reading. It is an expansion of it.”

The research doesn’t stop at reading and speaking. Writing about what students read also measurably improves comprehension and retention. Reading, discourse, and writing function as one interconnected system for building deep comprehension, for every student.

That’s why we approach this research through the lens of the Science of Literacy: a framework that brings reading, writing, and knowledge-building together, rather than treating them as separate initiatives. For multilingual learners in particular, that more complete picture is often what makes the difference between research that stays theoretical and research that changes practice, fostering confident, bilingual, biliterate learners in the process.

This post draws on research from Dr. Jeannette Mancilla-Martinez’s white paper, The Science of Reading and Multilingual Learners: Language Comprehension is Central. Read the full paper for complete citations and the full research base.

Dr. Mancilla-Martinez is an author of *Emerge!*, a core literacy program for grades K-5.